Ruminations

I was listening to an old talk given by Žižek in which he mentions a by now very tired joke of a cafeteria waiter who upon being asked for a coffee without cream is forced to tell his patron that he can only offer him coffee without milk.

Without getting into the Hegelo-Lacanianism which the joke seeks to exemplify, I was reminded of how I miss going out to the coffee shop and getting my coffee and my cream, sitting down and reading or musing or jotting down ideas on napkins, little thoughts which I’d usually just throw into the trash on my way out. And I remembered how when you’re served a coffee, the cream is usually placed next to the coffee. You order a coffee with cream and you get coffee and next to it the cream.

Brought me to a little tedious moment, an impasse of language, which is where I usually stumble, in which once again the friction is perceptible even though the reality to which this little impasse refers continues to slide on by unproblematically.

The friction comes at the moment I ask for the with, though what I get is a next-to. Why does my cream appear next to my coffee and not with it. Or is it not with the coffee that the cream appears by dint of it being next to it, because were it not to be as such you’d perhaps expect it to be in the coffee (after all , is not a latte what I want)?

Indeed what is the difference between “with” and “next-to”?

I hate being proscriptive but what if I say “with” implies deep relation between two things, an accompaniment in which the elements, the factors are in a sense enveloped or subsumed; whereas “next-to” is just that, relational positionality. Coffee with cream implies that the cream and the coffee are interacting or perhaps modifying each other. Coffee next to cream implies simply that there is a gap in space between the coffee and the cream, even if this gap is minimal.

But is this a real difference? When my friend walks in through my door and we talk after not seeing each other for months and he says, “I’m with someone now,” certainly he’s not being literal! I am with him right now and we go on to sit on the same couch, and yet we all know that it is precisely because he is not with me with me that he says he’s with someone else. And this “with,” by the way, certainly does not exclude the fact he is sometimes next to whomever it is he’s with, otherwise how else can he get dirty with them.

Or let’s say I say, “I’ve left some thing with your wife.” Does this not imply that whatever has been left is in some sense near your wife, next to her, or on her person, perhaps? Is it not the with that makes sinister the issue? A jealous husband would rather hope that whatever you leave you leave next to his wife and not with her!

So already my little dichotomy is fraught.

As the coffee with cream case shows, does not “with” imply a consummation? Contact? Is coffee with cream not a product—in the mathematical sense—a product which is precisely the quantity x multiplied by y, and which is written, to our mathemic delight, as x next to y, xy being altogether different from x and y?

The space between these two words, “with” and “next-to” is yet another hole in meaning, another gap in which sense siphons off, but which I find so important as to occasion my little alarm. For this hollow gap disturbs, especially when, for example, Alcibiades complains to Agathon that he had only slept next to Socrates and not with him (to his great consternation!).

There was no coffee with cream at the beginning of that morning, I’ll tell you that.

As always you have to be happy to open the aporia for someone else with more ego and less scruples to think they could resolve it.